Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Finally, the big decision on my next career move!

Well, after taking a couple of months off and spending the past couple of months exploring various options for my next career move, I have finally reached a decision. First, thanks for everyone who voted in my "going to the dark side" poll - I was honored that 474 votes were cast (though a few people admitted to voting multiple times!), with the final result (as of today) being:

No, don't do it! - 231 votes (49%)

Yes, it is your destiny! - 177 votes (37%)

Don't know / don't care / who is Peter Batty? - 66 votes (14%)

You can check out the geographical distribution of the US votes at pollmappr. Who am I to go against the wishes of my loyal blog readers, so I have elected to rule out the "dark side" option (this time round at least :) !!). Also, thanks to everyone out there who I had discussions with about potential opportunities - I appreciate everyone taking the time and showing so much interest.

But after all that I have decided that I am going to go ahead and do my own startup, which I mentioned as a possibility in an earlier post looking for developers. I'm pleased to say that I got a number of responses to that post and have a couple of really good people signed up to start with, and a few others who might come on board as things move along. The new company is called Spatial Networking, and we will be focused on location related applications in the social networking space. I don't want to say too much more than that right now, but we will be looking to get our initial offering out in a few months, and I'll talk more about what we're up to as things move along. I'm excited about the opportunity in the space we're looking at, it should be a fun ride!

Incidentally, a couple of people asked me if I was looking for investors, and I will be at some point fairly soon - if you have any interest in finding out more when I get to that stage, feel free to email me.

And I even removed the "made on a Mac" logo - there's no fooling some people :) !! I don't think that's going to be our web development tool of choice for long, but it was the most convenient thing to hand for creating a holding page :).

Thanks all for the good wishes! Alfred, not trying to hide the fact that I'm using a Mac, I'm quite proud of having made the switch ... but I think we will graduate to a slightly more sophisticated web development environment than iWeb fairly quickly! And Ed, I suspect that there's a good chance there'll be some Google API usage in the mix!

OK, we've outgrown iWeb! A friend of mine kindly donated us a cool new holding page with some nifty Javascript animation. Thanks!

And to Raj and others who are asking about when we'll say more about what we're up to, we're going to wait until we're a little further along to say too much more, though I may talk about some aspects of it before we're ready to launch the application. But as soon as there is something to share you'll find out about it here at geothought! There is a (very) subtle clue about one aspect of what we're doing in the new home page ;)

Peter. Congratulations! Your new venture sounds intriguing and challenging. This effort will definitely play to your technical strengths and visioning skills. I'm very excited and happy for you. Best wishes for another HUGE success! Just don't forget to make it FUN as well...Mike Cerkas

Peter Batty

About me

Peter Batty is a co-founder and CTO of the geospatial division at Ubisense. He has worked in the geospatial industry for 25 years and has served as CTO for two leading companies in the industry (and two of the world's top 200 software companies), Intergraph and Smallworld (now part of GE Energy). He served on the board of OSGeo from 2011 to 2013 and chaired the FOSS4G 2011 conference in Denver. He serves on the advisory board of Aero Glass. See here for a more detailed bio. You can email Peter at peter@ebatty.com, and can see videos of some of his conference presentations here.